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Name: WOODLEY, Frank William de Medewe MC, MBE
Nee: son of Frank Mascotte Medewe Woodley
Birth Date: 3 Mar 1929 Nairobi
Death Date: 12 Aug 1995 Nanyuki
First Date: 1929
Last Date: 1995
Profession: 44 years as a Game Warden in the Nat. Parks of Kenya. Distinguished himself in action against the Mau Mau - inspired the use of pseudo-gangs. Son of an Australian who had fought in the Boer War.
Area: Athi river, Nyeri
Married: 1. In Naivasha 27 June 1953 Daphne Marjorie Jenkins b. 4 June 1934 Nakuru, d. 12 Apr 2018 Nairobi (div. 1960, later m. David Leslie William Sheldrick) (dau of Bryan Buller Boyce Jenkins) 2. In Nairobi 1960 Ruth Emily Hales b. 4 Dec 1937 Liverpool, d. 9 Oct 1994 Nanyuki - worked as a secretary for Ker & Downey
Children: 1. Gillian Sala Ellen (Channon) (1955) 2. William T. De Medewe 'Bongo'; Benjamin P. De Medewe; Daniel F.N. De Medewe
Book Reference: Obituary - D. Telegraph 21/10/95, Sundown, Tsavo, Rundgren, Elephant People, Daktari, Hut
School: Prince of Wales School
General Information:
Elephant People - In 1948 he was on safari in the Tsavo area with a schoolfriend named Arthur Stephen .......... shot a bull elephant with 106 and 100 lb. tusks ...... he was due to start as a professional hunter - as number two to senior hunter John Lawrence. .... applied for a job as junior assistant warden for Tsavo and was successful together with Peter Jenkins .......... Woodley lived in a small farmhouse on the Athi plains 9 miles from Nairobi, and a mile across country from Nairobi Park. ...... This was where Woodley came to live when he was 8, when his mother bought the place and 50 acres for £250 after his father died. She lived there alone, a straight-backed, clear-eyed Englishwoman from Woolwich, who had first come out in 1913 as governess to a family of prospective settlers.
Laura Ellen Hassam, as she was then, had married in 1919 an Australian named Frank de Medewe Woodley. He had been in Africa since the Kaiser War during which he had served in the campaign against the Germans; he had later settled in Kenya. They had two children, Judy and Frank William (Billy). Clive, a son of Frank Woodley's by a previous marriage, had completed the family. And a friend, and almost one of them, was a lodger, Arthur Orchardson. In 1929, when Billy was born, his father was the Secretary of the Kenya Jockey Club. Billy remembered him as a sort of folksy rolling stone with a fund of apt, if earthy, capsules of wisdom. Clive had been killed in 1937, in a mining accident and the following year Frank Woodley had died of a heart attack in Tanganyika, leaving the family practically destitute. .....…..
Away in the distance on either side they could just see the homesteads of the neighbouring white farmers - the Destros, who sold their milk in Nairobi; old McDowell, an ardent pigeon fancier; the Visagies; the Kloppers, who had several lovely daughters and made the best biltong, drying out the meat on wires stretched across the bedrooms; the Francescons; the Watsons; the Sands - all of them solid, no-nonsense people, with whose children and whose African servants' and squatters' children Woodley had grown up. Woodley's mother had never fussed over him. She was a positive, forthright character who believed in letting him learn to take care of himself. He went barefoot most of the time, and he might be away from home sometimes for 2 or 3 days, sleeping in the open and living on impala or Thomson's gazelle he and his friends shot for the pot ..... two important influences in Frank's life - Alan Black and Charles (Tiger) Marriott. ..........….
Mau Mau - Woodley in Kenya Regiment - I Company - he was one of the original pseudo-terrorists - awarded the MC - a Captain
Telegrah - 21/10/1995 - Obituary on file
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